Could Firefox 3.5 Spark a Web Design Boom?

Mozilla recently released version 3.5 of its browser, Firefox, and it contained one tiny feature that could be a huge boon for web design: The ability to display any font, thanks to "@font-face," which allows designers to store fonts on their own servers, and reference them on their web pages. Designers Ian Lynam and Craig Mod have just posted a primer on the new feature, which shows just how much is possible. (A screencap of the primer is pictured above.)

If you have Firefox 3.0 but not 3.5, update now to see how dramatic the page looks, before and after. Previously, web designers who couldn't bear the thought of compromising on their type have relied on Flash or Javascript--which are, of course, clunky and annoying. @font-face is miles more elegant.

Safari has offered @font-face linking ever since version 3.1; Opera, meanwhile, has announced that the protocol will be supported in its next version. Internet Explorer, of course, is waaaaaay behind.

If you're interested in a longer, more detailed discussion of @font-face, check out this post on Mozilla Hacks.

[fastcompany.com]

Introducing user-centred web design

"We've spent thousands on that website and it’s bringing in no business at all. None of our customers seem to use it - we may as well have written the site in a foreign language!"

No one should be saying this kind of thing about their organisation's online presence, yet this problem is depressingly common. Quite often the problem is the process used to design the site.

Every variable was seemingly taken into account - except the most important one: "What do our customers actually want from our website?"

The solution is a new way of stating the questions that form the basis for web design: a perspective known as "user-centred design" (UCD).

Web initiatives are now a commonplace strategy for business and government alike. Increasingly, websites form the centre of organisational communication and marketing strategies. As a result, most of these organisations have got over the thrill of simply having a presence in cyberspace.

Now people are asking the hard questions, like:

"What's our website really for?"

"How do we use the web to make our business grow?"

"Are our customers satisfied with the experience of using our site?"

In the early days of web/business integration, it was often just decided that a website was a must have. Few businesses actually made the effort to find out whether their customers really wanted a website and if they wanted one, and what they would actually want to use it for. Those days have well and truly passed.

If you take a look at businesses that have succeeded in using the internet to grow, there are a few common features. These features are now known as "user-centred design" or "usability".

A classic example of a local site that succeeds through using the UCD perspective is Trade Me. One of the keys to Trade Me's success was that the company has always put the site user - the customer - at the centre of the equation. The site was designed to easily give customers what they wanted, not what the management team or the web designer wanted them to have.

Many sites present information the owners think is important, but that users of the site find unhelpful: as unhelpful as if it was written in a foreign language.

Other under-performing sites organise their content under poorly-designed headings that aren't comprehensible at first glance - or have working parts that are hard to use. A common design error is to animate the navigation links, so they move around the screen as you try to click them. Some web designers will tell you this is cutting edge, but your customers will use words that are much less complimentary.

UCD focuses on user needs and goals. It will be one of the essential characteristics of future net success. Many studies have shown for every dollar spent on UCD, businesses have gained $10 in increased revenue.

Usable sites have a number of key characteristics, including:

• Their navigation is intuitive - it can be understood at a glance.
• Their content is written specifically for online delivery, not simply re-used from hard copy marketing collateral.
• Your customers don't have to learn how to use the site - they can immediately see how to do everything they need to.
• Usable site content is often internationalised, so it can be easily read by those for whom English is not a first language.
• Accessibility guidelines are followed so that all customers can use the site, even those with poor eyesight or limited dexterity.
• Online help is visible on the screen where it is needed, if users do become confused.
• All the site features work properly, regardless of what browser software is being used.

Usability consultants, also known as information designers, can design usability into new sites or evaluate existing sites and make them more usable. A key strategy is to test sites with real users. Test subjects are asked to interact with sites and their reactions are observed. If the methodology is right, this can be done cheaply and quickly, with as few as three participants.

Wired Internet Group is one New Zealand web design company that has risen to the usability challenge. Wired has applied the concepts of UCD to the sites of some of its key clients. Wired’s usability consultants have developed a range of services, from full usability testing to quicker and more flexible approaches.

A good first step is to assess users' experiences of using a site by means of an expert evaluation. An information designer reviews the site and uses the information gained from this to interview both the site owners and some actual users. This process reveals what the site owners' actual goals are, as well as what the users really need.

From this we can see where the intentions and expectations of both sides fail to match. A written report outlines both findings and proposed solutions to specific usability concerns.

A usability test expands on this approach, with the expert evaluation used to identify usability concerns with the target site. The test consists of asking up to half a dozen representative users to try looking for specific information or performing specific tasks while using the site.

The usability consultant observes the test with a video camera and notes where groups of users are having trouble or misunderstanding the site. From these observations a report can be written, recommending improvements to enable people to enjoy trouble-free interactions with the site under review.

As awareness of the "usability revolution" spreads through the business and public sectors in New Zealand, demand is growing for web design and review services that match with the objectives of user-centred design.

As more business is done online, there is less room for those websites that seem to be written in a language that customers don't speak.

The second article in this series will look at the concept of user experience. As well as explaining user experience in more detail, the article will outline what skills are needed to embody it in good web design.


[computerworld.co.nz]

NEOTEC Upgrades Web Presence

The Northeast Ohio Trade & Economic Consortium has announced the launch of its newly redesigned Web site, which features updated information and an enhanced format that will assist companies with business support services and regional economic development initiatives.

The site focuses on NEOTEC’s four core services -- Foreign-Trade Zone 181, the International Trade Assistance Center, the Northeast Ohio Logistics Network and the Global Business Development Initiative -- and provides resources and links to related sites.

According to Ron DeBarr, NEOTEC president and CEO, the redesigned Web site is easy to navigate, yet provides a tremendous amount of valuable business support information for companies located in Northeast Ohio as well as for domestic and foreign companies considering expansion plans into the region.

"NEOTEC is a central point of contact for businesses, economic development professionals and site selection consultants who are interested in Northeast Ohio," DeBarr said. "Our new Web site offers a broad range of information to assist them in the areas of international trade, logistics, and global business development."

NEOTEC is a regional economic development partnership of 10 Northeast Ohio counties, including Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties.


[business-journal]

Building the Next-Generation Web Experience

Corporations building the next generation of user experience will have four attributes, and companies will need five skills to meet the challenge, according to Moira Dorsey, Forrester Research vice president and research director, who spoke at Forrester's Customer Experience Forum 2009.

She said that the ideal Web experience of the future will be Customized, Aggregated, Relevant and Social (with the acronym "CARS" as a mnemonic). She pointed to several services that take advantage of social networking and aggregation to deliver customized and relevant data to users.

Many mobile applications fit the bill -- but certainly not all. One that does is the Wikitude travel guide that aggregates content from multiple sources, uses GPS to determine where the user is, and then tells the user about their location.

Another is an app called Shop Savvy for the Android and iPhone that lets users search for an item, find out which stores nearby have it, and either call the store and reserve it or put them item on a wish list for sharing or to receive price alerts.

Stop imitating paper and be the Web

These sites succeed by taking full advantage of the Internet. "New forms of technology start by imitating older forms and then evolve into their true forms," said Dorsey.

As an example, she pointed to the Benz Patent Motorwagen of 1886 which looks more like a carriage than a modern day car. Even the famous Ford Model T required a hand crank to start. "The Austin 7 RK Saloon of 1928 was a car that you or I could start." She meant that in the Austin 7, the controls were located where a modern driver would expect them to be.

The first Web page appeared in 1991. In 1992 it still looked like a piece of paper.

"We've been working on the Web for ten years," said Dorsey. "It took the car 50 years to find its true form. The online experience has yet to find its true form."

But indications of change are in the air. Dorsey pointed to the increasing adoption of mobile devices, to the development of new interfaces, and to the proliferation of new Web sites and content creators as forces that will drive change within corporate Web design.

Follow customers and don't expect them to come to you

"We need an online experience that can span devices, sites, and locations," she said. She added that there are five things that companies can do to get ready.

Ccompanies will need to conduct more in-depth research to find the devices and channels that people use. Companies will use this data to create multi-channel personas, prototypical customers that will influence how a company tries to reach customers.

Dorsey said that surveys are not enough. Companies will need to conduct virtual ethnographic research in order to find out what people are actually doing -- not just what they say they're doing.

She said that companies will need to "atomize content and functionality to send content to where the customers are" and pointed to a recent Avis ad in which customers could reserve a car from within the banner without going to the Avis Web site as one example of how to do it right.

She said that companies will be developing new things that are so complex that they will need to test the user experience before they deploy.

Finally, Dorsey said that companies will need "mad design skills." She said that designers will need to build projects that span sites, devices and applications and that the developer experience will be "like designing software."

In the question and answer session, she admitted that not every company will need to have the most advanced online program. "Find where you can offer the most value," she said. "Deliver an experience that enables you to get the most value. It has to be useful first, then enjoyable."

But there's no avoiding some complexity. "Once you move from within your own Web site to delivering an online experience, the training wheels come off," Dorsey warned.

[internetnews]

How Accessibility Is Important To Any Website Design

Over recent years the Internet has become one of the most used sources for research of products and services. In fact 60% of people use the Internet to find a local business service and a further 60% go on to use a service they have found online.

However, there are drawbacks that many web design companies have yet to face. There is a large amount of people that suffer from a range of disorders including colour blindness, hearing problems and no or reduced use of their arms or hands. They find that many web sites do not cater for their needs and therefore become frustrated with certain limitations online.

The Creare Group is a web design and SEO company who make their sites accessible for as many people as possible. They develop their sites to cater for many different needs and comply with the equipment that many people with disabilities use. Sites designed for their customers are dependent on requirements asked for by the customer specifically.

Colour blindness affects more men than women where on average 3% of the population suffer from this condition. There are different types of colour blindness but all cases need to be considered when developing a web design.

The Creare Group develops their web sites with colours in mind to help with SEO campaigns. Links need to be obvious and stand out from the text or have text decoration. Colours too close to each other or those that cause problems for colour blind suffers, will cause frustration and not effectively use the site causing potential sales to be lost.

As well as not seeing colours there is a large percentage of people who suffer from poor eye site or partial blindness. For accessibility it is integral that the text on a web site is can vary in size to allow users to adjust accordingly. This is just another step that The Creare Group take to ensure that their web site designs cater for all needs by being fully functionally and accessible.

Often web sites have the addition of videos but more often than not have no way of letting hard of hearing users know the content. The Creare Group is working towards installing subtitles to follow the words alongside the speaker. This is still in development but this helps to maintain the high standards that The Creare Group try to achieve in ever area of their web design.

"Our aim is to make businesses a success, however you need customers to make this happen. We make our web sites accessible but understand there are more developments we can do to make sure we cater for all online users." Mike McKinlay MD

The Creare Group is proud of their achievements to making their sites - inlcuding ecommerce web design - more accessible. It is vital to find the right company to develop web design so customers are never alienated and can access your site without frustration.

For more information visit www.crearedesign.co.uk

[officialwire.com]

Website Design: Company Offers Over 5000 Templates For One Payment

Dream Templates Offers Over 5000 Templates For One Payment, you no need to learn HTML programming or trouble yourself with website design or even pay a small fortune to a website designer to get the website you want.

Usually what puts people off creating a website is the cost of paying a website designer to create your vision at an astronomical cost to you. It is either that or spend 3 years learning html and then pay lots of money for some web design software in order to proceed.

This is where dream templates comes in. Dream Templates have designed thousands of templates which you can browse through and for a one off payment you can use whichever templates you want. There is no need to learn any programming at all just enter your text and get your website up on the web live.



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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this website is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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[officialwire.com]

Web 2.0 Design & Development - What is Web 2.0?

The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and Media Live International. Dale Dougherty and O'Reilly noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and websites popping up with surprising regularity. Hence the Web 2.0 concept was born.

"Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second generation of web development and web design, that facilitates communication, secures information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs and others. The sometimes complex and continually evolving technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes RSS feeds, server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-oriented browsers with plug-ins and extensions and various client-applications.

To know more about Web 2.0, please visit the site http://www.newpathweb.com.au

Web Design Tips: The Laws of Ecommerce Navigation Design

CSS, Flash, jQuery, and an arsenal of other powerful web techniques and technologies have unbound website design, creating the opportunity to develop either exceptional user interfaces or really frustrating ones.

Furthermore, the growth of "cookie-cutter" ecommerce templates (i.e., "insert your logo here") has quelled site concepts with great potential and made some ecommerce pages as bland and tasteless as a papier-mâché popsicle.

To avoid the pitfalls of a site design that is too confusing, too ugly, or too experimental to be effective, the ecommerce site owner must strike a balance between leading-edge techniques and technologies, effectiveness, and aesthetics. So, in this edition of "Web Design Tips," I'll outline the laws for ecommerce site navigation design to help any ecommerce business.


Law No. 1: Make Navigation Easy to Understand and Use

Shoppers browsing to an ecommerce store don't want to be baffled by navigation. As I implied above, there are a lot of amazing things that you can do with site navigation that you shouldn't.

As a specific example, the agency Publicis & Hal Riney has developed site navigation that responds to gestures captured via web cam. The effect is stunning, and is an excellent way to demonstrate development talent. But as navigation, it is really frustrating. And if an ecommerce site deployed anything like it, I'd bet that they would never make a sale again.

Make your site navigation easy to understand and use. Provide clear labels that explain what a user will find when he or she clicks. If you sell shoes, try labels like "Men's Shoes" or "Women's Shoes" or "Nike." And put navigation in a predictable place, top, left, right, or front and center.

Here are some examples of sites obeying law number 1:

• Skooba Design features labels like "Laptop Bags" and "Apple 4G iPod Nano Cases"
• Bonobos, which sells nothing but men's trousers and shorts, has a homepage with a less than perfect middle navigation, but the sites store obeys this law perfectly
• Gateway obeys this law with a very nice top navigation that provides images (easy to understand) for many products
• Dripping in Fat features a front and center navigation that works because of the limited number of products on the site
• Crucial uses three forms of navigation-each clear-to make it easy for customer to find the computer memory or Flash cards they seek

Law No. 2: Make Navigation Accessible

Making your ecommerce site easy for customers with disabilities is good for business and the right thing to do. Some of your customers are going to have disabilities that require them to surf the web using screen readers, refreshable Braille displays, magnifiers, or other helpful devices. Develop navigation that these devices easily understand. Take a look at the World Wide Web Consortium's How People with Disabilities Use the Web for an idea of how these customers use websites.

One technique to try is to place text-based navigation and skip links (often hidden from most site visitors via CSS) at the very top of the page.

Here are some examples of sites obeying law number 2:

• Productive Alternatives is a very accessible site with a range of products
• Zahradka Art & Illustration is accessible and provides some visual interest
• Crawleys Furniture uses a simple text-based navigation at the top of the page
• Scruffs Hardwear is easy for devices like screen readers

Law No. 3: Tell Me Where I Am

Before customers can make a good choice about where they want to go on your site, they should know where they are. Because so many online shoppers use search engines to locate online stores, your customers can enter your site just about anywhere. So there is no guarantee that they are starting on the home page.

Use visual and text clues (i.e., breadcrumbs) to show the customer where he or she is on your site.

Here are some examples of sites obeying law number 3:

• Eagle Coffee Company uses CSS to change the look and feel of the active page in its left navigation and uses a clear breadcrumb to show the user just where she is
• Tokidoki uses pink font to highlight the current page in the navigation and has a good breadcrumb trail
• PEZ Factory Store has an easy-to-read orange breadcrumb and puts the current page in all capital letters in the left-hand navigation
• Cabela's actually includes the phrase "You are here" in its breadcrumb
• Newegg changes the background and font color of the current page and includes an accessibility-friendly breadcrumb

Law No. 4: Use Layers and Facets on Big Sites

If your ecommerce site has more than a few product categories, more than a handful of brands, or more than a dozen products, add navigation layers and facets.

As a customer, I want to be able to browse by brand, price, age-appropriateness, color, or just about any other relevant product attribute. Your navigation should let me do that right in place.

Here are some examples of sites obeying law number 4:

• PetsRight provides understandable layered navigation
• Ramco Worldwide offers a price facet -MiniRepublic lets customers navigate by just about any product attribute
• Wlanmall includes attributes like frequency, series, and radio frequency connector

Law No. 5: Let There Be Search

Every ecommerce site should allow shoppers to just search for products. Not a lot of explanation needed. Add a search box (yes it is a form of navigation) to every page on your site.

Here are some examples of sites obeying law number 5:

• Amie Street allows you to find music from any page on the site
• Knife Center has search right up top
• Art.com puts search to the left (ahead) of its text navigation

[practicalecommerce.com]

Five tips on good Web design

By TASHA CUNNINGHAM
Special to The Miami Herald

Whether you have decided to hire a professional Web designer or use one of the template services mentioned in mylast column to create your site, good design is essential to running a successful business on the Web.

Google the term ''good Web design'' and you'll find myriad websites devoted to the topic with advice on how to create perfect Web pages. Web design is largely subjective. While many experts differ on what really makes good Web design, there are a few fundamentals most can agree on:

• Think before you design -- Create a blueprint of the site you want before you pay that Web designer you've just contracted or begin working with favorite templates you've found online. Sit down, get out a piece of paper and actually sketch what you want your site to look like. How would it function? What would your site's key pages look like? Where will your navigation bar be? What colors will you use? What content areas will be on your site? This is a valuable first step. Your sketch will serve as a road map and quick reference guide as you implement your design.
• Choose content carefully -- Whether your site will be used to sell products or not, the content on it is important. It has to be high-quality and informative, particularly if you are promoting yourself as an expert in a particular field. Don't let misspelled words, shoddy grammar and poor sentence structure be the reason you lose a reader or customer.
• Color your site with care -- People respond to color. Choose soothing earth tones, such as forest green and gray, for your design.
• Name your pages properly -- To optimize your site's pages, be sure to name the URLs for each page correctly. Don't use symbols and numbers, which aren't search-engine friendly. Instead, use the name of the page, which will rank your site much higher in search results. A good example of a properly named page is www.Miami Herald.com/business, which indicates it's the business page of the Miami Herald. A poorly named page would look something like this: www.miami herald.com/?54=27#8=617, which tells you nothing about the page and is hard for search engines to index the site. I'm guilty of this with www.Chick Centric.com, but I'm working to fix it.

Most services that allow you to design a site using a template will generate URLs for your pages that have letters and numbers, but a fair number of them allow you to rename your pages.

• Get free expert advice -- Take advantage of the wealth of free information about site design available on the Internet. You want to get your site indexed by Google, so start there by using their free Google Webmaster Guidelines, which give you everything you need to create a site that Google will love. Other good resources are www.SitePoint.comand www.SiteProNews.com.

You've got a lot of work to do, so get started! In my next column, I'll show you how to make extra money with your site and give you a slew of great tips on how to market it for maximum profit.

Tasha Cunningham is a pioneering Web entrepreneur and a principal of The Cunningham Group.

[miamiherald.com]